PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksKeats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse...models a kind of criticism for the future ... This Keats is fully human. The book is a lover’s discourse in part because that is what love so often means: to love through the flaws and faults of the lover ... this short book is expansive, perhaps grounded in six poems but sprawling out to contain reflections on contemporary writers, sexual misconduct, death, and more ... Each chapter tries something different, and the book feels essayistic in the truest sense: as attempts at new ways to relate to these poems ... This is a book about Keats but it is for his admirers. It is an ode to a poet and his poems that have touched generations. Stylistically, A Lover’s Discourse appears freed by the sensuousness of Keats’s own verse, standing on the verge of becoming something more than literary criticism. While not an imitation of Keatsian style, Nersessian shares his willingness for vulnerability and for writing that enfleshes the experience of being subject to the world because you are a subject in it ... Nersessian illustrates the vitality of certain kinds of thinking: thinking about the best aspects of art, about love and harm, about the connections we forge to others and the environment.
